Progress Is Not a Goal

On 29 September 2025, the CEO of Vercel posted this:

Enjoyed my discussion with PM Netanyahu on how AI education and literacy will keep our free societies ahead.

We spoke about AI empowering everyone to build software and the importance of ensuring it serves quality and progress.

Optimistic for peace, safety, and greatness for Israel and its neighbors.

Thirty-three million views. It is not an obscure remark, and it was not misconstrued. It says what it says.

Read it twice. The problem isn’t the politics. The problem is the grammar.

Notice what has agency in those sentences. AI will keep societies ahead. AI empowers everyone. It serves progress. The author is a witness to something already in motion—a weather report, delivered by a man who arranged to be photographed standing in the weather. There is no actor who chooses, and therefore no actor who could be wrong.

There is no actor who chooses, and therefore no actor who could be wrong.

You know this grammar. You’ve heard it your whole professional life, because it is the native dialect of consequence-avoidance and our industry speaks it fluently. Mistakes were made. The algorithm decided. The model hallucinated. Jobs will be displaced. Every one of these sentences has been carefully relieved of its subject, the way a crime scene gets wiped down. Somebody made the mistakes. Somebody wrote the algorithm, chose its objective function, shipped it knowing what it optimized for. The model didn’t hallucinate onto your users; a team with names and a deadline decided the hallucination rate was acceptable. Jobs will not “be displaced” the way rain falls—a person with a budget will eliminate them and another person will build the tool that makes the elimination legible as inevitability.

That is not sloppy writing. It is the characteristic voice of a person who has decided in advance that whatever happens next is not their responsibility, and who has found a vocabulary that makes the decision invisible—including, and this is the crucial part, to himself. The grammar isn’t the crime. The grammar is the confession, delivered by a man who doesn’t realize he’s confessing.

I want to take that seriously, because I think it names the central ethical problem of our profession, and because three thinkers diagnosed it long before anyone had a phrase like “AI literacy.” None of them are exotic. Two of them are on every undergraduate syllabus and the third should be. What’s remarkable is not that the diagnosis exists—it’s that a profession this smart has arranged, with some care, never to read it.

Hume: you cannot get an ought from an is

Start with the oldest objection, and the one everything else rests on.

In A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), David Hume noticed that moral arguments perform a silent substitution. An author spends pages establishing what is the case—how things are, how they came to be, what follows from what—and then, without warning, the copula changes. Suddenly every proposition is joined by an ought. Hume’s complaint wasn’t that the conclusion is wrong. It was that a step has been skipped and the author hasn’t noticed. You cannot derive a value from a fact. Some further premise is doing the work, and if it isn’t stated, it isn’t being examined.

Two hundred and eighty years later, the substitution is still running, at scale, in production. Apply it to the post:

Is: AI capability is advancing rapidly.
Is: More people can produce software than before.
Ought: Therefore this constitutes progress, progress ought to be accelerated, and being “ahead” is the thing to want.

The missing premise is enormous. It contains an entire theory of what human flourishing consists of, who counts as a beneficiary, what “ahead” means and ahead of whom, and—crucially—what may be traded away to get there. None of it is argued. It is smuggled in as though it were a fact about the world rather than a contested claim about value, and the smuggling works because the audience has been trained to receive capability claims and value claims in the same register. Ask an engineer whether a benchmark improved and you’ll get an answer with error bars. Ask whether the thing the benchmark measures is good—good for whom, at whose expense, stopping when—and you’ll get a look that suggests you’ve brought weather into a physics seminar. But no quantity of is ever sums to an ought. You can stack model capabilities to the ceiling and you are exactly as far from “and therefore this should be built” as when you started. The distance isn’t covered by more facts. It’s covered by an argument, and if nobody in the building can remember making one, that’s because nobody did.

This is the foundational move, and every other trick in the genre depends on it. Once “progress” is established as a fact rather than a choice, the person making the choice disappears, and with them anyone you might hold to account. Hume, a man of famously good cheer, would at least have laughed at the efficiency of it.

His other contribution matters here too, and it’s the one that stings. Hume argued that reason alone never motivates action—that “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” He did not mean be irrational. He meant that the engine of moral life is what you actually care about, and intellect is the instrument that serves it. Reason can tell you how to get what you want with astonishing precision; it is structurally silent on what to want. Now look at how we train engineers. A computer science education is a half-decade-long sharpening of the instrument—complexity, correctness, throughput, elegance—with the question of ends relegated, if it appears at all, to one ethics elective taught at 8am by whoever lost the scheduling fight. A profession that trains people to be superb instruments while declining to ask what they are an instrument of produces exactly what Hume would predict: extraordinary means, unexamined ends, and a hiring pipeline optimized to deliver the former into the service of whoever is least troubled by the latter.

Arendt: the problem was never that he was a monster

In 1961 Hannah Arendt went to Jerusalem to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker. She expected a monster. What she found unsettled her more.

Eichmann was a functionary. He was diligent. He was preoccupied with his career and mildly aggrieved about promotions he felt he’d been denied. He spoke in the clichés of his organization and appeared to hold no thought that had not been issued to him. In Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), Arendt reached the conclusion that made the book notorious: the man was not a fanatic or a sadist. He was thoughtless. He had simply never occupied the position of the people his work processed.

Her argument gets flattened into “evil is ordinary” or “anyone could do it,” which turns it into fatalism, which is exactly the reading that lets everyone off. The actual claim is more specific and far more demanding. Arendt identified a faculty—thinking, by which she meant something precise: the silent internal dialogue in which you split into two and interrogate yourself, the conversation Socrates called being “out of step with myself.” Thinking, in her sense, is not intelligence. Eichmann had adequate intelligence; he organized transcontinental logistics under wartime conditions. What he lacked was the two-in-one—the capacity to come home at night and face the other fellow in his head who asks what did we do today, and can we live with it? Her observation was that the absence of that faculty, multiplied across an administrative apparatus, is what makes industrial-scale atrocity possible.

Not hatred. Hatred doesn’t scale. It burns out, it’s inefficient, it requires everyone in the chain to be personally invested, and personally invested people are erratic.

Thoughtlessness scales beautifully. It requires only that each participant attend to their own segment, execute it well, and decline to ask what the segment is part of.

Hatred doesn’t scale. Thoughtlessness scales beautifully.

I should deal honestly with the strongest objection to this reading, because it exists and it’s serious. Bettina Stangneth’s Eichmann Before Jerusalem (2014), working from the Sassen interviews Eichmann gave in Argentina, argues that the man Arendt saw in the glass booth was a performance—that the private Eichmann was a committed, ideological antisemite who understood exactly what he had done and was proud of it. Suppose Stangneth is entirely right. What follows is that Eichmann was a worse man than Arendt judged—and that the framework survives untouched, because the framework was never really about him. The machinery that moved millions of people to their deaths ran on tens of thousands of schedulers, clerks, railway dispatchers, and procurement officers who were not performing banality for a courtroom. They were the real thing. And if the star defendant turns out to have been a fanatic wearing a functionary’s mask, the lesson gets sharper, not softer: the mask worked, in front of the century’s most scrutinized courtroom, because the functionary is a completely plausible thing to be. A society learns to see the monster. It has no antibodies against the man who just handled logistics.

That is a description of a modern engineering organization. I don’t say that to provoke. I say it because the org chart, the sprint, the ticket, and the abstraction layer are specifically designed to let each person reason about their component without reasoning about the system. That is what makes them powerful—modularity is how you build anything larger than one mind. It is also what makes them dangerous, and the danger isn’t a defect in the method. It’s the method working exactly as intended, pointed somewhere nobody checked.

This has a history, and engineers should know it the way pilots know about specific crashes. IBM’s German subsidiary, Dehomag, leased Hollerith punch-card machines to the Reich—census tabulation, the flagship data-processing technology of its day. Edwin Black’s IBM and the Holocaust documents the arrangement in exhausting detail: the machines were leased rather than sold, serviced on site, their card layouts custom-designed for the client’s requirements. The client’s requirements included counting Jews. Nobody at a tabulating-machine company had to hate anyone. They had to hit their numbers, maintain the equipment, and not ask what the sort operation was for. The census machine’s operators occupy the exact structural position of an engineer tuning a ranking function today: proficient, incurious, and load-bearing. Tom Lehrer put the whole thing in two lines about Wernher von Braun, the rocket engineer whose employer changed but whose job never did: “Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department.” It’s a joke with a body count, and the reason it still lands is that the department in question is always hiring.

Why Arendt in particular

There’s a reason to reach for Arendt here rather than any other moral philosopher, and it isn’t rhetorical convenience.

Arendt was a German Jew who fled the Nazis, was interned at Gurs, escaped, and arrived in the United States stateless in 1941. She had standing.

She was also, from early on, a critic of the political direction of the state whose court she was reporting from. In “Zionism Reconsidered” (1945) she warned that establishing a Jewish state without resolving the standing of the Arab population would produce permanent conflict and morally deform the project itself. She argued for a binational federated arrangement and was largely dismissed for it.

Three years later, on 4 December 1948, The New York Times published a letter signed by Arendt, Albert Einstein, Sidney Hook and others protesting Menachem Begin’s American tour. They described his Herut party as “closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties,” and noted that the leadership of American Zionism had declined to expose the danger to its own constituents.

Hold those two facts together. The woman who gave us “the banality of evil”—writing about a trial held in Jerusalem—had already spent years warning that a state can be founded by survivors of atrocity and still commit grave wrongs, and that the people best positioned to say so are the ones most strongly discouraged from saying it. She paid for the analysis with friendships that never recovered and a community that never fully took her back, and she published it anyway, which is roughly the going rate for saying a true thing early.

This is why the reflexive dismissal fails. Applying Arendt’s framework to the conduct of the Israeli state is not a hostile appropriation of a Jewish thinker’s work against her own people. It is the use she made of it herself, at personal cost, in real time. Anyone deploying her name as a shield against the argument has not read her. She is the argument.

Durkheim: prosperity is a destabilizer

The third piece is the one people find most surprising, and the most underrated.

In Suicide (1897), Émile Durkheim identified a category he called anomic suicide—arising not from misery but from normlessness: the condition in which the rules calibrating a person’s expectations to their circumstances stop functioning, so desire has nothing to measure itself against. Durkheim understood norms not as constraints on a life but as load-bearing structure. A functioning norm answers the question what would be enough?—and a person who can answer that question can also, on a good day, experience arrival. Satisfaction is not a mood. It’s a measurement, and it requires a scale.

Here is the part left out of the summary. Durkheim’s central claim is that anomie is produced by rapid change in either direction. He was explicit—and his readers have been quietly ignoring it for a century, because it’s the uncomfortable half—that sudden prosperity deregulates as thoroughly as sudden collapse. A boom shatters the scale by which people had measured a sufficient life. Appetite, having no natural ceiling of its own, expands to fill whatever space it is given; he called the resulting condition the disease of the infinite. It leaves people with an infinity of desires and no means of satisfying any of them—and that condition, not poverty, is what he found correlated with self-destruction.

Read that as a description of an industry. Read it, specifically, as a description of a Tuesday in this industry.

We have built a culture in which the reference point resets every eighteen months, in which “what is sufficient” is definitionally unanswerable because the frontier moves before you finish the sentence, and in which the governing verb is keep up. The senior engineer who shipped something genuinely good last year is not permitted to stand on it; the ladder she climbed was wheeled away mid-climb and replaced with a different ladder, angled differently, leading somewhere else. Every plateau is reframed as decline. Every “enough” is evidence of insufficient ambition. We then observe, with apparent puzzlement, that the people inside this arrangement are exhausted, that meaning is scarce, that a workforce selected ruthlessly for capability reports historically poor mental health, and that the standard prescription—more capability—somehow fails to help.

Durkheim would not have been puzzled. He’d have recognized the chart. Deregulated ascent is not the opposite of crisis. It is a form of crisis, and its signature symptom is precisely the inability of anyone inside it to say what would be enough.

So when someone says “progress” as though naming an unambiguous good, the honest follow-up is Durkheim’s: progress toward what, measured against what, and at what point are we permitted to stop? A conception of progress that cannot answer those questions is not a goal. It is an appetite that has learned to describe itself in the language of virtue.

An appetite that has learned to describe itself in the language of virtue.

Progress is an externality, not a goal

Here is the claim I want to defend.

Progress is not something you can aim at. It is a word applied retroactively to what happened when determined people refused to accept a broken system.

Look at anything you would genuinely call progress and you find that the people who produced it were not pursuing progress. They were pursuing a specific grievance. They wanted this factory to stop maiming workers. They wanted this law repealed, this water clean, this ward staffed, this person to stop being treated as property. “Progress” is the word historians attach to the aggregate afterwards. It was never in the room. Nobody at the Triangle Shirtwaist memorial marches was carrying a sign that said onward; they were carrying a hundred and forty-six names.

The distinction isn’t academic, because the two orientations behave completely differently under pressure.

If your goal is a specific injustice, you can tell whether you are winning. The grievance is either addressed or it isn’t. You have a stopping condition, a measurable, and a constituency who will tell you bluntly when you’ve failed them. Notice that these are the exact properties we demand of any engineering objective before we’ll take it seriously—falsifiable, observable, owned—and notice that “progress” has none of them.

If your goal is “progress,” you can never fail—because whatever occurred is, by construction, what progress turned out to look like. Harm becomes a transitional cost. Displacement becomes disruption. The people who bore it become an unfortunate feature of the adjustment period, and the adjustment period, on inspection, has no end date. There is no state of the world that could falsify the claim that you were making things better, which is another way of saying the claim is empty. We would laugh a junior engineer out of the design review for proposing a success metric like this. We elect people who talk this way to boards.

This is exactly where Arendt’s thoughtlessness and Hume’s missing premise meet. “Progress” is a thought-terminating concept. It delivers the feeling of having justified something without the labor of having done so.

”Progress” delivers the feeling of having justified something without the labor of having done so.

Not geniuses

A corollary that matters more than it looks.

The mythology of this industry is that progress issues from exceptional individuals—that history is a relay race between geniuses and the rest of us are spectators with good seats. This is false as history and corrosive as ethics.

False, because the record doesn’t support it. The eight-hour work day. The weekend. Workplace safety law. The extension of the franchise. The dismantling of formal segregation. None came from a visionary. They came from enormous numbers of ordinary people, most of whose names are gone, who were stubborn for longer than the systems opposing them could sustain. The mechanism was not brilliance. It was courage, humility, and persistence, distributed across people of every background and every color, most of whom never saw the outcome and knew they wouldn’t. That last clause is the one the genius myth cannot metabolize: these people paid in a currency—decades of their one life—for a return they did not expect to collect personally. There is no pitch deck for that. There is only the conviction that the grievance was real and the refusal was owed.

Corrosive, because the genius myth is load-bearing for abdication. If progress comes from exceptional people, then you—an ordinary engineer with a mortgage and a standup at 9:15—have no role and no responsibility. You’re the audience. The myth is comfortable precisely because it excuses you, and you should always audit a belief that pays you to hold it.

The historically accurate version is far more demanding. It says the outcome is the sum of ordinary refusals, which means it depends on yours.

Your dependency graph has a politics

Here is where this stops being philosophy and starts being a Tuesday decision.

The man in that post runs the company behind Next.js. An enormous share of the web’s front end is built on it. That is not incidental to the argument—it is the argument, arriving at your terminal.

We tell ourselves that tools are neutral, and at the level of the compiler that’s true enough. But the historian of technology Melvin Kranzberg got it exactly right in the first of his laws: technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral. A framework is not only a compiler. It’s a company, a funding structure, a hiring pipeline, a conference stage, a set of defaults, and a person who gets to speak with the accumulated authority of everyone who depends on it. That authority is real and it is conferred, not earned per-utterance: the reason thirty-three million people saw a software executive’s geopolitical mood report is that several million developers made his product load-bearing. When you npm install, some fraction of your professional legitimacy is lent upward. That fraction is small. It is not zero. And it aggregates—which is, after all, the entire theory of a package ecosystem.

I want to be careful, because the weak version of this argument is genuinely weak, and I’d rather state the objections than have them stated back at me:

Maintainers are not executives. The people writing the code are mostly not the people posing for photographs, and punishing the former for the latter is neither fair nor effective.
Switching costs are real. “Rewrite your stack” is cheap advice from someone not paying for it, and for most teams it is simply not available.
Purity is unreachable. Every layer of this industry has a compromised actor somewhere in it. A standard that requires clean hands requires you to stop computing.

All true. And none of it establishes that the correct fraction of consideration is zero, which is what “tools are neutral” actually asserts. Notice the shape of the maneuver, because it’s the same shape every time: the impossibility of doing everything is presented as a reason to do nothing, by people for whom nothing was always the preferred amount.

What I’d say instead: you get to choose your defaults, and defaults compound. Not a purge—a preference. When two options are close, let this be the tiebreaker. When you’re starting something new, where the switching cost is nearly nothing, choose deliberately. When someone asks why, tell them, because the telling is most of the mechanism—a stated reason is a permission slip for the next person’s reason.

I moved this site off Next.js. I’m not going to pretend that inconvenienced anybody but me, or that a static site generator is a political act. It cost me a weekend and it bought me nothing except that I no longer have to think about it. That is a small thing. Small things are what aggregates are made of.

And if it ever costs more than a weekend—if it means a language, a stack, a job, a city—that’s a price I’ve decided in advance I’m willing to pay, so that I don’t have to relitigate it in the moment when it’s hardest to think clearly. Deciding in advance is the whole trick. It’s the moral equivalent of writing the runbook before the incident. Arendt’s Eichmann never decided anything; he just kept finding that the next step followed from the last one, and each step was small, and the staircase only had a direction when you stood back from it—which he was careful never to do.

What this actually requires of an engineer

Moral exhortation that terminates in a feeling is worth nothing. Concretely:

1. Reinstate the actor in your own sentences. Every time you write that a technology “will” do something, rewrite it with a subject. Not “AI will democratize software” but “we are building X, which we expect to have effect Y on population Z, and here is who bears the cost.” Most of the time you will find you cannot finish the sentence. That’s the point—it’s the missing premise becoming visible. This is a grep you can run on your own design docs tonight, and I’m telling you from experience that the first pass is humbling.

2. Know what your abstraction is abstracting. Not needing to know what’s underneath is a genuine professional virtue; it’s also the precise mechanism Arendt described, industrialized. You don’t need to know everything. You do need to know, at least once, end to end, what the whole system does—who its inputs are, where its outputs land, and what happens to a person on the receiving end of its worst-case behavior. “I only worked on the scheduler” has a history, and the history has a punch-card logo on it.

3. Recognize that engineering leverage is unusually high and unusually early. This is the practical asymmetry. The person who says “that’s not technically feasible on that timeline” is believed in a way that the person saying “that’s wrong” is not. Whether that’s admirable is beside the point; it’s a real lever, disproportionately held by people who insist they have no power. Retention defaults, what gets logged, whether a record can identify an individual, whether a deletion is real, whether the export endpoint exists—these are settled in implementation, by someone with a ticket, usually months before any policy conversation happens, and the policy conversation, when it comes, will treat whatever was implemented as a law of nature. That someone is frequently you. You are not downstream of the policy. The policy is downstream of you.

4. Refuse in ways that leave a record. Quiet non-participation is individually clean and collectively useless. A refusal that is written down—in a design doc, a review comment, a resignation letter that says why—changes what the next person believes is possible. In 2018, thousands of Google employees signed an open letter opposing Project Maven, the company’s drone-imagery contract with the Pentagon; some resigned outright, publicly, stating their reasons. Google declined to renew the contract and published a set of AI principles it had previously not felt the need to have. You can be cynical about how durable any of that proved—I am—and the mechanism still stands demonstrated: none of those engineers was individually decisive, and collectively they moved a trillion-dollar company’s revealed preferences, because each visible refusal repriced the next one. Most of what makes a norm is people discovering they weren’t the only one.

5. Accept that you might be wrong, and act anyway. This is the humility half and it isn’t decoration. Arendt’s demand is that you think, not that you reach a particular conclusion. Someone who adopts a position because their timeline adopted it hasn’t thought; they’ve just changed which authority they defer to, and a borrowed conviction is thoughtlessness wearing a lanyard that says engaged. Thinking means holding open the possibility that the thing you’re building is good, examining it anyway, and being willing to discover that you were the one who was wrong. The two-in-one only works if the other fellow in the dialogue is allowed to win.

Precision is a weapon, not a weakness

If you’re going to say hard things about powerful people, say them exactly.

The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant on 21 November 2024. The Pre-Trial Chamber found reasonable grounds to believe they bear criminal responsibility for the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and intentionally directing an attack against a civilian population, and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts, over a period running from at least 8 October 2023 to at least 20 May 2024. The warrants remain outstanding and are enforceable in principle by all 125 states party to the Rome Statute.

That is the accurate formulation and every word of it is defensible.

He has not been tried. He has not been convicted. Writing “convicted war criminal” would be false, and would hand every reader looking for an exit the exact exit they wanted. Writing “subject to an outstanding ICC warrant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity” is unarguable—and it is not one degree less damning, because the thing being described is a sitting head of government formally accused by the world’s permanent criminal tribunal of starving a civilian population.

The same discipline applies to the man who posted the photograph. He is not accused of anything by anyone with jurisdiction. He is a chief executive who chose to publicize a friendly meeting, in a tone of untroubled optimism, with a person under that warrant—and then described the subject of the conversation as progress. That is the whole of the charge, and it is enough. It requires no embellishment, and embellishing it would only give the argument away.

Precision is not squeamishness. It’s what lets a claim survive contact with people who need it not to. The strongest version of an accusation is always the most exact one, and the people most eager for you to overstate are the ones planning to litigate the overstatement instead of the substance. This is, engineers will notice, just rigor—the same discipline that makes you write the failing test before the fix. A claim you’ve weakened to its provable core is a claim nobody can take away from you, and there is a special pleasure, which I recommend, in watching someone arrive ready to dispute the adjective and find that you never used one.

The objections, taken seriously

A piece like this is worth nothing if it only speaks to people who already agree.

“You’re demanding engineers become political.” They already are. Every default is a policy. Every retention window is a judgement about whose past can be used against them. Every ranking function is a distribution of attention. The choice isn’t between political and neutral engineering—it’s between politics you’ve examined and politics you’ve inherited. “Neutral” means “aligned with whoever set the defaults,” which is a political position with unusually good branding.

“Individual refusal accomplishes nothing. Someone else will build it.” Sometimes true, and the argument proves too much: it’s an argument against ever being first to refuse anything, and it dissolves every norm that has ever formed—including, inconveniently for the people who deploy it, the norms they currently enjoy. Someone was first to refuse the twelve-hour shift. Someone was first to say the O-ring memo goes in writing. It also misdescribes how professional norms actually arise. They form when enough individuals make a thing costly and embarrassing to ask for. Nobody is the decisive refusal. Everybody is a term in the sum, and “my term is negligible” is how every sum that ever mattered got smaller.

“AI literacy is genuinely good. You’re attacking a benign statement.” The statement isn’t the target. The structure is. Read it again: no subject who chooses, no population named, no cost acknowledged, and no condition under which the author would conclude he’d got it wrong. A statement engineered so that nothing could count against it isn’t a claim—it’s a mood, delivered in the vicinity of a man under indictment, carrying the implication of endorsement and the deniability of having said nothing. We have a word in engineering for output that is technically well-formed and semantically empty, and the fact that I don’t need to say the word is the point.

“This is selective outrage. Why this and not everything else?” Selectivity is a condition of finite attention, not a character flaw, and this objection is almost always deployed to produce paralysis rather than consistency. The honest answer is: yes, and you should apply the same standard everywhere you have leverage. The person asking usually hasn’t—the demand for perfect consistency is, in my experience, made exclusively by people who have solved the problem by being consistently absent.

“You’re asking people to risk their livelihoods.” Sometimes, yes, and it should be said plainly rather than dressed up. Not everyone can afford to refuse—visa status, dependents, health insurance and immigration all bind differently, and a movement that only admits people who can afford martyrdom isn’t a movement. But the corollary is load-bearing: those with the most slack owe the most refusal. If you’re senior, well paid and employable, the cost to you is a fraction of the cost to a junior engineer on a work visa. Obligation scales with capacity, and pretending otherwise is how people who could act cheaply hide behind people who can’t.

Those with the most slack owe the most refusal.

Where this leaves me

The personal part, without hedging.

I don’t believe technical excellence absolves anyone of the question of what they’re excellent for. I don’t believe “progress” names a goal—I’ve argued it names an externality, the residue left by people who fixed a specific broken thing and let history do the summarizing. I don’t believe the people who produced the progress worth having were geniuses. They were ordinary, stubborn, frightened people who kept going, from every background and every color, and most of them are unrecorded, and the unrecordedness is not a gap in the argument. It is the argument.

And I will not treat the conduct of a head of state under an outstanding ICC warrant for starvation as a method of warfare as neutral background for a conversation about developer tooling. Not because I’m certain of every fact in a contested and horrifying conflict—I’m not, and the previous section exists because I’m not—but because the posture is not contested. The studied incuriosity. The vocabulary built so that agency vanishes. The optimism issued from a position of total insulation, about outcomes that will land entirely on people who were not in the photograph. That posture is the exact thing Arendt spent her life describing, and she described it from the one position nobody can dismiss: closer to the fire than anyone asking her to be quiet.

Stacks are interchangeable. Languages are interchangeable. Employers, cities and countries are, with difficulty and privilege, interchangeable. What isn’t interchangeable is the answer you give when someone finally asks what you were working on, and whether you thought about it. Everyone in this profession will eventually be asked. The only variables are when, by whom, and whether you started drafting the answer while it could still change.

Arendt’s demand was never that you be heroic. It was that you not be thoughtless. The bar is low. It’s available to everyone. And clearing it is still, somehow, unusual.

Sources

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Book III, Part I, Section I—the is-ought gap.
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963).
Hannah Arendt, “Zionism Reconsidered,” Menorah Journal (1945).
Einstein, Arendt, Hook et al., letter to The New York Times, 4 December 1948.
Bettina Stangneth, Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer (2014).
Émile Durkheim, Le Suicide (1897)—anomie, including the anomie of prosperity.
Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust (2001)—Dehomag, Hollerith machines, and the leasing arrangement.
Melvin Kranzberg, “Technology and History: ‘Kranzberg’s Laws,’” Technology and Culture 27, no. 3 (1986).
International Criminal Court—defendant page, Benjamin Netanyahu.
UN record of the 21 November 2024 Pre-Trial Chamber decision.
Just Security—mapping state reactions to the warrants.